With the Hong Kong highlights behind us and the weekend ahead, we suggested our friends join us on a quick overnight getaway before we ventured off to discover China for the next week.  And as expected, our ever reliable travel friends are just as incapable of saying no to a trip as we are, so they helped us book a ferry ticket and promised to meet us after work…in Macau!  Feeling like public transport pros at this point (the wrong direction detour of the previous day was long forgotten), we loaded up our belongings and attempted the Hong Kong trolley to the ferry dock…and after 30 bumpy minutes and a hike up a very steep hill, we gave into a taxi.  Apparently we still needed some practice with this, but maybe we’d win the taxi fare back in the casinos tonight.

Macau is a very old city which in the last 5 to 10 years has begun to morph into Asian Vegas, but as much as my husband feels the lure of the bright lights and blackjack tables, old and crumbly will always win out.  Determined to explore the Old Town for our few free hours, we dropped our luggage at the hotel bag check and jumped in a cab…and went no where. I was under the impression that my map-loving husband had scoped things out and knew what was what…but apparently he didn’t even open Macau on Google Maps until we were on the ferry from Hong Kong and at the point our “work anywhere international data cell phone” stopped working…for 10 hours! [Ed. note: in all fairness, T-Mobile says it works in Macau. Our friends have the same T-Mobile plan, and it worked on previous trips…but their phone didn’t work this time either. 100% not my fault.] Okay, option B, we tried to convince our driver, who spoke only Cantonese, to take us “somewhere cool” in Old Town. The skeptical glare basically said it all, but he put the car in gear anyways and we headed down “the strip” for parts unknown.

And a short journey later, our driver stopped, and pointed out of the car and up a hill a bit…I guess we were there? In truth, we seemed to be in the shopping area with street upon street an unusual mixture of gold jewelry stores and street food stalls. Maybe this is what people come to Macau for… We decided we had a few hours to kill on a nice afternoon and just started to roam. We found an old and crumbly church, stumbled upon the Bellagio fountain show…at the Wynn…and put $200 (Hong Kong, so about $30 US) on red in the MGM – and won! Deciding to end our solo tour on a high note, we caught a cab back to our hotel to cross paths with our arriving friends…by sitting on our over-sized backpacks in the lobby of the nice casino hotel since our cell still didn’t work…I’m surprised security didn’t eject us!

The real party was set to start however – we had a full Friday night in Macau and couldn’t wait to live it up! Dinner was first and what we expected to be a simple  Portuguese meal morphed into pitchers of amazing sangria, bottles and bottles of beer in foam coozies, a suckling pig, and none-too-subtle hints by the restaurant staff trying to kick us out so they could finish closing the place! No fear, this was Asian Vegas, we could find somewhere else to welcome us.  We started walking between the casinos, which all seemed to be connected by bridges just like in Las Vegas, and suddenly we had surprise floor seats at the Venetian lounge. We rocked out to the slow jams of the house band “Funk Shui” who seemed to have hired the forgotten Huxtable daughter (Denise!) as their lead vocals…and a Marcus Lee lookalike from Houston as her backup dancer/singer! What we planned on as a quick drink before some gambling was once again us shutting down the house…early ferry and flight in the morning long forgotten, of course!

While we failed to see much of the cool city and definitely didn’t win back all those taxi fares [Ed. note: no tables of blackjack, no craps…], we found a love for another gambling town and were happy that unlike Monaco, they didn’t seem too put off by our backpack-wielding ways!  And…we got to hang out with someone besides each other for several days in a row which might have been the only thing to keep our sanity in check as we delved into more of Asia over the week ahead…